DANIEL WICKBERG, President. Associate Professor of Historical Studies/History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Cornell University Press), and his essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including American Historical Review, Critical Inquiry, Journal of American History, and Modern Intellectual History. His areas of interest include the history of ideas about self and society, historiography, and transatlantic modernity. His recent work has focused on the history of the idea of sympathy in modern thought.

KEVIN SCHULTZ, Treasurer. A native of Los Angeles with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Kevin M. Schultz is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he teaches American religion, ethnoracial history, and the history of American intellectual life. His first academic monograph, Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011), charted the decline of the idea that the United States was a “Christian nation” and the subsequent rise of the notion that the country was premised on something called “Judeo-Christianity.” Schultz’s current work examines the intertwined lives of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Norman Mailer as a way to explore and better understand that pivotal decade. That book is under contract with W.W. Norton & Co., which will publish the manuscript in Spring 2015.

RAYMOND HABERSKI, JR., Secretary. An associate professor of history at Marian University in Indianapolis, Indiana, Haberski is the author of four books, including most recently God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (Rutgers, 2012). For the 2008-2009 academic year, he was the Fulbright Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the Center for the Study of the Americas (CSA) at the Copenhagen Business School. He is completing a book on Franciscan media for the Academy of American Franciscan History and has begun a project on Catholic thought from the end of the Second World War to the present.

TIM LACY, Chair of Publications. A founding member of the USIH blog and the Society, Lacy recently finished a book on the history of the great books idea and philosopher-educator Mortimer J. Adler entitled, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). An academic advisor at Loyola University of Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Educational Affairs, Teaching and Learning Center, he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Loyola University, Chicago in history. Lacy’s investment in the intellectual history as a field has been the single most significant factor in the development of the USIH blog and conference. Future projects include a manuscript on the transnational history of the great books idea for a co-authored book, and then a long-simmering study of anti-intellectualism.

CARA BURNIDGE, Co-Chair 2014 Conference (Indianapolis). Cara L. Burnidge is a historian of American religions and will receive her Ph.D. in Religion from Florida State University in August 2013. Interested generally in religion and politics, her research focuses on the relationship between religion and politics, especially U.S. foreign relations, in the early twentieth century. Her current research reconsiders the standard narrative of American Protestantism during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, challenging the conventional wisdom that liberal Protestants lost their optimistic and progressive reform impulses as a result of World War I.

ANDREW HARTMAN, Chair 2015 Conference (Washington, DC). An associate professor at Illinois State University, Hartman focuses on twentieth-century United States intellectual history. His first book, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. Hartman is currently writing another book, A War for the Soul Of America: A History of the Culture Wars, From the 1960s to the Present, which is contracted to be published by the University of Chicago Press. A War for the Soul of America will be the first comprehensive, full-length historical treatment of the culture wars, a series of public controversies that emerged from the polarized 1960s, dominated headlines during the 1980s and 1990s, and remain with us today.

JENNIFER BURNS, Chair 2016 Conference (Stanford University). Burns is a historian of the twentieth century United States working at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular interest in ideas about the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics. Her first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009), was an intellectual biography of the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. She has published articles about the history of conservatism in a number of academic and popular journals, including Reviews in American History, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Cultural Economy, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Dissent. Burns will sit on the executive committee for the 2015-2016 session as an officer.

LORA BURNETT, Chair 2017 Conference (Dallas, TX). Burnett is a PhD candidate in Humanities/History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas; she has an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford. Her dissertation explores an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ of the 1980s: the ‘Great Books’ / ‘Western Culture’ debate at Stanford University. Burnett will sit on the executive committee for the 2016-2017 session as an officer.